Word: waco
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week Editor Brann was very much alive. His words smoked and crackled in the pages of Brann and the Iconoclast (University of Texas; $3.95), by Charles Carver-and burned again in Waco. The book sold briskly and set such old arguments raging as the one between Texas Naturalist Roy Bedichek, 79, and his wife. Fifty years ago, a bitter dispute over Brann's views almost broke their engagement. Shortly before the book came out, when Mrs. Bedichek learned that her husband had written its introduction, she almost broke up a dinner party with her angry objections. Brann...
Wind & Froth. "Tall in body and mind," a handsome, brown-eyed man with a deep voice, Brann first hit Waco at the age of 39 after an odyssey that began in rural Illinois. He went to work as a bellhop when he was 13. By 21, he had been a painter, freight-train fireman, brakeman, baseball pitcher and manager of an opera company. Then, educating himself as he went along, he worked on newspapers in St. Louis, Galveston, Houston, Austin and San Antonio. In Austin, his first attempt to run his own paper foundered...
...Waco, subscriptions soon deluged him in the currency of a dozen lands. The 16-page Iconoclast was a potpourri of flamboyant comment on all things, laced with spleen, belly laughs, erudition, ribaldry and scorpion satire. Often intemperate, rarely constructive, Brann could be-and was-accused of doing more harm than good. But it was hard to fault his eloquence. On the approaching marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough, he mocked: "The fiancé of Miss Vanderbilt is descended...through a long line of titled cuckolds and shameless pimps, and now stands on the ragged edge of poverty...
Brann kept his sharpest sting for "the blatant jackasserie" of Waco's entrenched Baptists and their "storm center of misinformation," Baylor University. He needled the local Baptist press for "ladling out saving grace with one hand while raking in the shekels with the other for flaming advertisements of syphilitic nostrums." He riddled one proposal that Baptists do business only with Baptists. He ridiculed Waco's Sunday blue laws, mocked how the town fretted about liquor sales while it licensed prostitutes. He seized avidly on the scandal of a 14-year-old Brazilian girl who, studying at Baylor...
...Waco never quite forgot its prairie Voltaire. The grass had hardly begun to cover his grave when a figure stole into Oakwood Cemetery and fired a gun point-blank at Brann's bas-relief profile on the stone. Like his contemporaries, those who followed could never agree whether he was saint or devil's apostle, infidel or genius. But, as Waco was reminded last week after almost 60 years, the words outdistanced the bullets...